Only Kimberly doesn’t seem to notice the glare. She cries, “Oh, thank God,” when she sees Cheryl. “Cheryl, tell her—tell this bitch I don’t know anything.”

But Cheryl just shakes her head.

“You told her Lindsay and Coach A were involved?” she snaps. “Why would you do that? Why? You know it wasn’t true.”

Kimberly, seeing she’s not going to get any support from Cheryl, backs away from her, still shaking her head. “You… you don’t understand,” she hiccups.

“Oh, I understand, all right,” Cheryl says. For every step she takes forward, Kimberly takes another step back, until Kimberly’s back is up against Magda’s desk, where she freezes, looking fearfully up into Cheryl’s face. “I understand you were always jealous of Lindsay. I understand you always wanted to be as well liked and popular as Lindsay. But it was never going to happen. Because you’re such a fucking—”

Only Cheryl doesn’t get to finish. Because Kimberly has collapsed against the cashier’s desk, sliding slowly down it until she’s on the floor, a puddle in New York College white and gold.

“No,” she sobs. “No, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t kill her!”

“But you know who did,” I step forward to say. “Don’t you, Kimberly?”

She’s shaking her head. “I don’t! I swear I don’t! I just—I know what Lindsay did.”

Cheryl and I exchange puzzled glances.

“What did Lindsay do, Kimberly?” I ask.

Kimberly, her knees curled up to her chest, murmurs softly, “She stole his stash.”

“She what?”

“She stole his stash! God, what are you, dense?” Kimberly glares up at us through her tears. “She stole his entire stash, about a gram of coke. She was mad at him, ’cause he was so stingy with it. Like, she’d blow him and he’d just give her a line or two. Plus he was seeing other girls, too, on the side. It was pissing her off.”

Cheryl takes what seems like an involuntary step backward when she hears this. “You’re lying,” she says to Kimberly.

“Wait,” I say, confused. “Whose stash? Doug Winer’s? Are you talking about Doug Winer?”

“Yes.” Kimberly nods miserably. “She didn’t think he’d miss it. Or if he did, he’d think one of his frat brothers took it. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Cheryl!” Kimberly is glaring at her fellow squad member. “Lindsay wasn’t a fucking saint, you know. No matter what you and the other girls want to think. God, I don’t know why you guys could never see her for what she was… a coke whore. Who got what she fucking deserved!”

Kimberly’s sobbing has risen to hyperventilation level. She’s clutching her arms to her stomach as if she were suffering from appendicitis, her knees to her chest, her forehead to her knees.

But while Cheryl has backed off, looking horrified, I’m still not about to let Kimberly off the hook.

“But Doug did miss the coke,” I say. “He missed it, and he came looking for it, didn’t he?”

Kimberly nods again.

“That was why Lindsay needed to get into the café. To give him his coke back. Because she hid it in here, didn’t she? Because she didn’t think it would be safe to leave in her room, where Ann might find it.” Nod. “So she got the key from Manuel, let herself in here, smuggled Doug into the building somehow, and… Then what? If she gave it back… why’d he kill her?”

“How should I know?” Kimberly lifts her head slowly, as if it were very heavy. “All I know is that Lindsay ended up getting what she deserved after all.”

“You… ” Cheryl is glaring down at the other girl, her chest rising and falling rapidly with emotion, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “You… you… bitch!”

Which is when Cheryl draws her arm back to slap Kimberly, who cowers—

But Cheryl’s hand is seized before she can bring it down across Kimberly’s face.

“That,” Detective Canavan, who has come up behind us, says calmly, “is enough of that,ladies.”

“So there you go,” I say to Pete, as we sit at the sticky table in the back of the Stoned Crow after work. “There’s your motive, plain as day.”

A glance at the security guard’s face reveals that he’s at least as confused as Magda. “What?” they both say at the same time.

“That’s why he killed her,” I explain patiently. “Lindsay was going around, shooting her mouth off to her friends about his drug dealing. He had to silence her, or risk getting caught eventually.”

“You don’t have to cut someone’s head off just to shut them up,” Magda says indignantly.

“Yeah,” Pete agrees. “I mean, murder’s pretty extreme, don’t you think? Just because your girlfriend’s a little gossipy, you don’t have to kill her.”

“Maybe he killed her as a warning,” Sarah says, from the bar where she’s sitting watching a college basketball game on one of the overhead television sets. “To his other customers. Warning them to keep their mouths shut, or suffer a similar fate. Oh, Jesus! Charging! CHARGING! Is the ref blind?”

“Maybe,” Pete says, poking at the microwaved burrito he picked up in the deli down the street. But that’s the price you have to pay when the cafeteria at your place of work is shut down again so forensic teams can extract body parts from the kitchen slop sink. The burrito is the first thing Pete’s had a chance to eat since breakfast. The beer and popcorn I’m currently enjoying is mine. “Or maybe it was just the kind of thing a sick pervert like Winer thinks is funny.”

“We don’t know for sure it was the Winer boy,” Magda points out.

Both Pete and I stare at her.

“Well,” she says, “you don’t. Just because that girl said he was the one Lindsay was supposed to meet doesn’t mean he was the one who did meet her. You heard what the detective said.”

“He said we should mind our own business,” I remind her. “He didn’t say anything about whether or not he thought Doug—or his brother—did it.” Even though I’d taken him aside and, after telling him what I’d observed at last night’s frat party, had added, “It’s obvious that Doug—and Steve, remember what Manuel said, that Steve was the name Lindsay mentioned—killed her for shooting off her mouth about their drug dealing, then left her head as a warning for the rest of their clients. You have to arrest them. You HAVE to!”

Detective Canavan, however, hadn’t appreciated being told that he “had” to do anything. He’d just frowned down at me and said, “I should have known that was you at that party last night. Can’t you go anywhere without causing bedlam?”

At which I took umbrage. Because I’ve been lots of places where fights didn’t break out. Lots of them. Look at me here at the bar across from Fischer Hall.

And okay, it’s only, like, four minutes after five, so hardly anyone else has gotten off work yet and the place is pretty much empty except for us.

But no bedlam has broken out. Yet.

“So when are they going to do it?” Magda wants to know. “Arrest those boys?”

“If they’re going to arrest them,” Pete corrects her.

“But they have to,” Magda says, blinking rapidly over her alcoholic beverage of choice—a White Russian. Pete and I can’t even look at it without gagging a little. “I mean, they took that Kimberly away with them to interview her after she said all those things in front of us… even if she lied to them later, they heard what she told us in the cafeteria.”

“But is that evidence?” Pete asks. “Isn’t that—what do they call it on Law and Order? Hearsay?”

“Are you telling me they didn’t get one fingerprint from that kitchen?” Magda demands. “Not one stray hair they can get DNA from, to find out who did it?”